"The Vampire Lestat"

"Lestat," a new musical that opened last night at the Palace Theatre, is almost bad enough to be good.

Almost, but not quite.

This show has been worked on so much since a disastrous tryout in San Francisco that what's left is the beat-up skeleton of a musical. It has been cut down so much that there's practically nothing left.

The musical has a score by Elton John and lyrics by Bernie Taupin, the longtime John collaborator who wrote the words to "Rocket Man."

The show is about vampires. It is based on two of best-selling author Anne Rice's vampire novels, "The Vampire Lestat" and "Interview With the Vampire."

Unfortunately, vampires don't do well on Broadway, especially in musicals: Recently, "Dance of the Vampires" and "Dracula: The Musical" both crashed and burned, quickly.

Maybe this has to do with the fact that Broadway generally likes uplift in its musicals. (Stephen Sondheim is the exception that proves the rule.) Whatever else they are, vampires are not uplifting.

It is to book writer Linda Woolverton's credit that the show moves more briskly than an Ann Rice novel. Reading Rice's "The Vampire Lestat" feels rather like swimming through molasses.

Yes, she has a huge following, and has sold 40 million books. Call it an acquired taste. Even reading Rice's Playbill bio for this show feels like slog.

"Each beloved character, iridescently animated and virtually manifested before our eyes, witnesses its creator's experience in triumph and sorrow in searching for some semblance of Happy Peace."

It is a well-known fact of publishing that nobody edits Rice. But they can cut a musical she didn't write. And Woolverton, Taupin and director Robert Jess Roth ("Beauty and the Beast") have cut the show down to its bare essentials. Which leaves its hero, Lestat (played blandly by Hugh Panaro), with one basic preoccupation per act. Act One: His weird mother. Act two: His creepy "adoptive" daughter.

The mother, Gabrielle, is played by Carolee Carmello, a remarkably strong Broadway performer much too seldom seen on the New York stage.

Unfortunately, John's idea of a Broadway score involves a lot of high-decibel screaming which passes (in the age of "American Idol") for singing.

A gifted actress with great stage presence, Carmello isn't given any nuance to play, and she has to scream a lot. At the beginning of the show, Gabrielle is dying. Lestat, who has been inducted into the vampire club, solves the problem by biting Ma in the neck, gives her a sip of his blood and giving her eternal life.

In Act Two, which takes place in New Orleans, he takes pity on an orphan girl, Claudia (Allison Fischer) and gives her the treatment.

She becomes the focal point for Lestat's domestic arrangement with another man, Louis (Jim Stanek), which is presented — by Rice and this show — as a same-sex marriage with no apologies.

That's terrific, but it underscores the absence of any heterosexual love interest in this musical. This remains a problem on Broadway, where — for better or worse — love interests of the heterosexual variety go with uplift as generally desirable plot points.

Claudia is a scary brat, who lives in a doll-filled room and sings a bratty number called "I Want More." Much later, when she is punished for trying to kill Lestat by getting her just deserts (one of the few audience-satisfying moments in the show), her doom is spelled out by a vampire chorus of "No Greater Crime Than to Kill Your Kind." Here the show is almost bad enough to be good. Almost.

One overarching theme that is reduced to bare bone is Lestat's quest for a creature who seems to be king of the vampires.

This Marius (Michael Genet) appears (rarely) on mountaintops, head shaved and dressed in the maroon robes of the Dalai Lama. The relation of vampires to Buddhism remains unclear.

There are two subthemes, one involving Lestat's Act One boyfriend Nicolas (Roderick Hill), who makes an incomplete transition to the vampire world and winds up brain-damaged. The other is presented as Lestat's great enmity with the villainous vampire Armand (Drew Sarich) in Paris.

But there's not much scenery to speak of, either in Paris or New Orleans. Most of the $12-million budget for this show seems to have gone into the costumes by Susan Hilferty, and the hallucinogenic projections each time somebody gets it in the neck.

Perhaps "Lestat" is a missed opportunity. Or maybe it's just a doomed effort to translate Rice's hopelessly dense prose to the Broadway stage.